Why Google Ads Should Be an Essential Part of Your Paid Ads Strategy

AdWords, also known as paid search, is more important to your company’s paid social ads strategy than ever before. Why? Because it’s an easy way to drive quality users to your site. And you can do it for very little money and effort. If you want to get ahead of the competition, you’ll need to integrate AdWords into your paid ads strategy.

What Is AdWords?

Google AdWords is the largest pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform in the world. While Bing and Yahoo! also have paid search platforms, Google AdWords is widely accepted as the most dynamic and best paid search platform on the web.

Google fields more than 3.5 billion search queries every single day, and each one of those queries is an opportunity for you to advertise to potential customers.

But what does that mean?

Basically, companies (like yours) pick keywords they want to bid on. Keywords are specific words or phrases that you deem important to your business—and you can pick as many as you want. For instance, a mechanic shop might bid on keywords such as “oil change near me,” “mechanic,” or “new tires.”

As long as users search for those words or phrases in the location you’ve selected in your AdWords campaign, your company will be entered in the bidding war for that specific query.

In a matter of milliseconds, Google hosts an auction with you and everyone else who has decided to bid on that specific keyword. The winning bid is showed at the top of the SERP with a small green text box that says “Ad” to let users know it’s a sponsored link.

The best part? You don’t pay for Google to show your ads until a user clicks on it. You can generate a significant amount of brand awareness without having to pay a penny unless someone clicks on your ad.

In other words, AdWords is an easy and affordable way to get your company listed at the top of SERPs for specific keywords that you deem relevant to your business.

Why Choose AdWords?

The simple answer is that AdWords complements the paid advertising your company is already running. Adding an AdWords campaign to your strategy is an attractive option for any business, regardless of your marketing budget. A company’s budget doesn’t have to be very big at all to generate real results.

But what makes AdWords so great?

1. Options, Options, Options

You can build a variety of flexible, dynamic campaigns with AdWords. There are options for search network, display network, shopping, video, and universal app campaigns, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages. And, after your ads have been running for a few weeks, you can launch retargeting campaigns to target users who didn’t convert the first time they saw your ad.

Because there are so many options on AdWords, you’re able to build campaigns that will run exactly as you want them to.

2. Build Flexible, Dynamic Campaigns

AdWords gives you almost full control over your campaign (which is any marketer’s dream!).

You have the power to edit the location, time, and budget of your ads, giving you the best possible chance to reach the audience to which you’re truly interested in showing your ads.

Is a certain keyword garnering more conversions than others? Great! You can adjust your bidding for that specific word or phrase, meaning that it will be shown more often than some of your less successful keywords.

3. Easy to Maintain

Once your AdWords campaign is set up, maintenance and optimization are very simple. You can spend as little as 30 minutes a week on your account and still see huge results. Editing ad text, keywords, and final URLs can be done in a few minutes or less, making it easier than ever to stay relevant to your consumers. Check out these easy tips to optimize your search network campaigns.

4. Up Your Organic Game

It’s pretty simple math: you’re paying Google to place your ads at the top of a SERP. This means your business name is one of the first things a user will see after searching, so they are more likely to visit your site.

In fact, you can run campaigns that are directly focused on increasing traffic. Campaigns focused on a high CTR and low CPC are a great first step in driving interested traffic to your site.

Once the campaign is live, monitor your clicks, CTR, keywords, and search terms to ensure you’re getting as much traffic to your site as possible. By targeting certain keywords and writing relevant, interesting text ads to match your keywords, paid search ads can increase traffic to your site and lead to more conversions.

If you’re looking for an easy, inexpensive way to boost traffic to your site, AdWords is the answer.

5. Increase the Quality of Your Web Page Visitors

Here’s the thing: Google doesn’t care about you. Google is focused on keeping users happy, so it will only show ads that are relevant to a user’s query.

How does this benefit you?

Well, since you’re bidding on high-quality users who are actively searching for someone like YOU, they are much more likely to convert.

The more your ads and landing page relate to a search query, the happier a consumer will be when they click on your site. Google recognizes when users consistently click your ad, and in turn, it will show your ads even more. All because Google wants to keep its users happy.

To illustrate this point, let’s refer back to the mechanic metaphor. If someone searches “fix a flat tire near me,” they are actively searching for a mechanic to take their car with a flat tire. While your company’s name may show up in the organic results, you have a much better chance of snagging this conversion by bidding on the keyword “flat tire.” Your ad will show at the top of the screen, and the person looking for a new tire will come to your mechanic shop instead of your competitor’s shop.

6. Measurable

The most exciting part about AdWords is how much you can measure and how easy it is to read and understand the metrics Google provides.

Does your boss care about your CPA? CPC? CTR? Conversion rate? Average position? No problem! AdWords tracks all of those metrics, and more.

You can even customize your metrics bar to show whatever metrics are most important to you.

It’s easy to see how successful your campaigns are doing because you can track metrics day by day, week by week, or look at the lifetime success of the campaign.

Why Should YOU Use AdWords?

You might be thinking, “This is all very interesting, but why do I need to jump on the AdWords train?”

Well, there’s an easy explanation: because your competitors are.

AdWords has become such a prevalent part of paid ad strategy that your company is already behind if you’re not using it.

If you’re interested in using AdWords to increase your paid ad success, get in touch with Wallaroo Media. We are AdWords certified for every type of campaign and are happy to help you reach your paid ad goals!

Author

Katie Rhoton

Director of PPC + Social Marketing Manager